Liezen Pocket

The Liezen Pocket (7-12 May 1945), also known as Operation Penguin, was an encirclement campaign of World War II that took place around the municipality of Liezen in Styria, central Austria. The Liezen Pocket contained 3,500 troops of the remnants of Army Group Ostmark under Joseph Wiener, who were besieged from two sides by Alexander Patch's US 7th Army and Fyodor Tolbukhin's 3rd Ukrainian Front. On 12 May 1945, they surrendered.

Background
By 7 May 1945, only Prague (Czechoslovakia), Dresden (Germany), Graz (Austria), and Zagreb (Croatia) remained in Axis hands. The British 8th Army advanced up Italy with Mark Clark's American, Polish, Brazilian, and Canadian forces, and Heinrich von Vietinghoff surrendered on 2 May 1945 as the capital of Nazi Germany, Berlin, fell to the Allies. The Americans advanced through Germany to Leipzig in Saxony, where they met up with the 1st Ukrainian Front of Ivan Konev. The Yugoslav Army of National Liberation made a thrust through Croatia to reach the port of Trieste in present-day Slovenia, and the US 7th Army secured the Austrian border crossing of Salzburg. The Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front was 50 miles to the east, leaving unoccupied territory that stretched from Dresden up north to Zagreb to the south. The corridor contained the last German forces, mainly Volkssturm militia that chose to fight to allow refugees to flee from the Soviet Union; Wehrmacht regulars that wanted to be captured by the lenient Western Allies and not sent to labor or reeducation camps in Russia; irregular forces that wanted to stop an Allied invasion of their homes; and finally, fanatic Waffen-SS who wanted to go down fighting.

Battle
The Allies at Salzburg under Alexander Patch planned an operation code-named "Penguin" to close the gap and meet up with the Soviet forces at Vienna. The Soviets refused to leave Vienna due to the high casualties that they had suffered in the capture of the city, so the Americans had to attack. Previously, they had forced the surrender of some German panzer units at Bad Ischl not too far from the Liezen Pocket, so they had to deal with the last 3,500 German troops in the area. Generalleutnant Joseph Wiener took command of the German forces and ordered them to fight their hardest if the enemy that they faced were Soviets. His frontline commander Major Friedrich Aube did not notice that the enemies that had came to fight them were Americans and ordered his men to dig in and fight the Americans. A few US troops were killed, stopping Patch's plan to possibly convince the Axis forces to surrender. American tanks were sent to push the gap inwards towards the municipality of Liezen, and the retreating German trucks were destroyed. Aube was killed by a bullet to the head and the German troops were boxed in to the town of Liezen itself by 9 May. Three days of American bombardment by mortars and tanks wore down the German defenses and Wiener suffered facial injuries from shrapnel from a grenade blast. Wiener ordered his units to surrender to the first GI patrols that they encountered on 12 May and he surrendered to Sergeant John Hammond with ten regular soldiers.

Aftermath
The German and Austrian prisoners-of-war were kept behind Allied lines at Salzburg, where they were held in a castle. The Americans proceeded to meet up with the Soviets on the front line of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, and the Allied forces divided the Dresden-Zagreb Gap in two. Soon after, the Soviets captured Prague on 11 May and the Germans in Czechoslovakia were defeated. On the same day as the fall of Prague, the last German troops surrendered.